October 28, 2014 STAFF/STU

On the Sharability of Aesthetic Pleasure: From Kant to Proust

On Tuesday, November 4 at 2:00 p.m. in the Jardine Room of the Lombardo Student Center, JCU alumnus Joseph Tanke, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will deliver a talk entitled “On the Sharability of Aesthetic Pleasure: From Kant to Proust.”

This will be an investigation on the resurgence of aesthetics within philosophy and the humanities more generally. He will examine the recent attempts to try to formulate a politicized version of aesthetics, with an emphasis on recent developments in European philosophy.

Professor Tanke has lectured and published extensively on issues and figures in Continental philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. His major publications include Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (Continuum, 2009) and Jacques Rancière: An Introduction—Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2011). Professor Tanke recently completed (with Colin McQuillan) The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2012), a new textbook for use in courses dedicated to aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and literary theory. Additionally, Professor Tanke is interested in comparative aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and the historical ontology of pain within Western thought and medicine.